Not sure why I felt like I needed to reach this again, other than it popped up to the top of my Kindle list for some reason. It’s still one of the best military science fiction stories with nearly a third of the book taking place in boot camp and really only having a single real combat story element, but it’s tightly written and the world is so well made that I didn’t even notice that last part until it was all over. There’s some real unfortunate stuff in the book though, I’ve not done a lot of research on if these were Heinlein’s actual thoughts on politics, but the book is solidly in the facist camp, with a firm opinion that it’s the loss of corporal punishment on both a parental and societal level that’s caused all the modern issues of crime and social decay. With hindsight we can see that when this book was written in 1959 that crime was really just getting started, so I wonder how he would feel knowing the huge spike would be happening in just 20 or 30 years later, then having a massive drop to way below the 50’s levels, all because we opened abortion access and stopped mainlining leaded gasoline?
After reading this, I can see how John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” did so well with all those elements removed and a more modern humanity depicted. In fact, I actually recommend OMW over Starship Troopers these days, if only because Scalzi’s version has actual green little men in it.
Read the book because a guy at work was defending the book’s stance. We were supposed to read the book and debate it’s point of view. Dude ending up saying something really dumb to a female coworker and got his ass fired before we ended up having that lunch meeting.
After reading the ENTIRE chapter about corporal punishment being a good thing my brain kind of broke. Wait, was Heinlein actually like this or did he write this so very over the top that he’s sure people would read it as satire? He’s dead so we can’t ask him but in the research I did after reading the book it seems like the guy was kind of hard to pin down.
I think I can see the point of the book in isolation (even though it was badly delivered).
My take: Effective socio-political engagement requires understanding the cost and personal price, and the idea that veterans had demonstrated the understanding, or at least paid the purchase price to engage in politics. The nugget of the point would be that folks would be reluctant to warmonger once they knew the price.
Except that in my experience is that there is a too large “hammer and nail” fallacy with many veterans.
If you read a bunch of Heinlein’s other stuff, he is very close to Rand-ian libertarianism: fuck you, I got mine; everyone is just after a piece of mine. It kinda gets lost in the message of Friday, I will Fear No Evil, and the Cat who Walked Through Walls were a woman’s highest purpose is to be a willing baby factory but for the right genetic stock.
This book was roundly panned by Brian Aldiss (maybe in his autobiographical trilogy The Horatio Stubbs Saga). He says that it’s painfully obvious Heinlein had never been in combat and should refrain from writing about it until he had. Aldiss fought the Japanese in WW2 in the jungles of Burma, so knew what he was talking about.
I managed to unearth a review of Starship Troopers by Brian Aldiss – and what he says is nothing like my recollection. Maybe he said it somewhere else. Anyway, here’s the review:
www.panshin.com/critics/PITFCS/141aldiss.html